Poll: Democrats gaining ground with undecided Latinos

The Democratic pitch is resonating with more Hispanic voters since Vice President Harris became the party’s nominee, according to a new poll by UnidosUS.

The survey, conducted Aug. 5-23, found 59 percent of respondents leaning toward or supporting Harris and 32 percent breaking for former President Trump. Last November, 51 percent of respondents expressed support for President Biden and 33 percent for Trump.

“Since becoming the party's nominee just a month ago, Vice President Harris has measurably increased Latino support, and her candidacy seems to be resonating with greater numbers in our community, but there is work to be done to reach the levels of support Democrats need and had achieved in previous elections,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS.

Hispanic voters are not only more aligned with the Democratic presidential candidate now than last November; those gains extend to some downballot candidates and to views on specific issues.

Economic concerns, particularly inflation and cost of living, have consistently topped the charts as priority issues in postpandemic polling of Hispanic voters.

According to the UnidosUS survey, 45 percent of respondents said Democrats have better solutions to reduce inflation and overall cost of living, compared to 27 percent who said Republicans are better equipped to handle the issue. Another 11 percent said both parties would be good at solving the issue, and 10 percent said neither party could effectively curb inflation.

In 2023, 39 percent of respondents said Democrats were better on inflation, 21 percent said the same of Republicans, 17 percent viewed both parties as equals and 12 percent said neither party was effective.

The shift reflects rising polarization as more voters make up their minds: Those undecided on the presidential candidates dropped to 9 percent in August from 16 percent in November.

“The biggest change from our last cycle of polling is the recovery of Democratic two-party vote at the presidential level, and frankly, really, at all levels,” said Gary Segura, founder of BSP Research, the group that conducted the poll.

On a number of issues, many of those previously undecided respondents have shifted their support toward Democrats.

For example, 48 percent of voters in the 2024 poll said Democrats are closer to their views on the American Dream, while 25 percent said the same of Republicans and 13 percent said neither party reflects their position.

In the 2023 poll, 37 percent of respondents said Democrats reflected their views on the American Dream, 25 percent said the same of Republicans, and 20 percent didn’t align with either party.

Though Democrats have seen gains from one poll to the next, they haven’t significantly cut into Republican support, nor have they succeeded in turning a majority of Latinos against the GOP.

According to the survey, 27 percent of respondents said Republicans care a great deal about Latinos, 47 percent said they don’t care too much and 26 percent said Republicans are openly hostile against Hispanics.

Those numbers are a slight pro-GOP uptick from November, when 25 percent said Republicans care a great deal, 48 percent that they don’t care much and 26 percent said they are hostile to Latinos.

Democrats did manage to cut the number of voters who view them as hostile; in August, 7 percent of respondents said Democrats are hostile to Latinos, down from 11 percent in September.

And 52 percent of respondents said Democrats care a great deal about Hispanics, up from 48 percent in the previous survey.

Much of the party’s polling improvement can be traced to Harris’s ascension as the Democratic nominee.

“It has been the case for the last five years or so, going back even into the last Trump administration, that Democratic policy positions are more popular than Democrats,” said Segura.

“Now, part of that is that people have flaws, and opposing candidates highlight those flaws, and so people become less popular than the positions they're espousing. But this has been a significant problem for Democrats for some time. It is a problem that very seriously weighed heavily on a reelection bid by the president.”

Beyond candidate selection, both parties have a lot of ground left to cover on voter engagement.

Only 23 percent of respondents said they’d been directly contacted by Democrats in this election cycle, and 16 percent said the same of Republicans. Nonpartisan and community organizations reached 12 percent of respondents, and campaigns regarding ballot initiatives reached 8 percent.

“As astonishing as 55 percent not contacted [is] — which includes, by the way, any contact people may have had from organizations — it's actually an improvement from what we've seen before, believe it or not, in previous polls, election polls, meaning people who voted or were 100 percent certain they would vote, the average noncontact rate was about 60 percent,” said Clarissa Martínez de Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS.

The 2024 poll was conducted among 3,000 Latino eligible voters online and via telephone in English and Spanish, with a reported margin of error of 1.8 percentage points nationally.